Indigenous Cultures

If one thing has the ability to make me puke, it is hearing first worlders (especially those that own Priuses) talk about the 'beauty' and 'heritage' of this or that indigenous culture and lamenting the fact that greedy corporations are destroying them. Look at their idyllic villages, say the concerned first worlders. Look at their traditions, their language. They have been this way for generations upon generations, living in spiritual harmony. And the greedy corporations the Wal-Machts of the world, they want to take all this away for their lebensraum of the same cookie-cutter strip malls and factories! The bastards!

I hate the assholes who talk like this, the same assholes who protest WTO meetings and hate factories, the hippies who sit in the oak trees in Berkeley for two years to save them while the Amazon is being deforested, who despise foie gras while millions of domestic animals are starving strays roaming the streets of third world slums, who bemoan environmental degradation and third-world poverty yet oppose the development of GMOs, the one ready-for-use technology that has the potential to cure both, who vote for Ralph Nader and leave George Bush in charge, who write blog posts blasting the use of technology, who believe in spiritual communion with nature as if nature gave half a fuck about them, who value animals above people. They make me sick, the fucking hypocrites.

The cultures they talk about can be found almost everywhere that isn't the first world, from Tibet to Africa to the Indian Reservations (no, the Reservations are NOT what I'd call first world) to South America. These cultures have much in common: their mentality is almost always overtly tribal, they have pronounced 'spiritual traditions' (which usually take the form of either constructing and then destroying elaborate works of art or slapping on paint and dancing around a fire to drums and chanting). They have 'traditional medicine', typically administered by shamans, and there is always, ALWAYS, a massive concentration of power into the hands of a few chieftains and shamans (or, in the case of the most vile of these cultures, in Tibet, the Lamas) who rule by the 'will of the gods' or simply by fiat. These societies are poor, ignorant, illiterate, backwards. Their first world 'supporters' consider them 'beautiful' and 'inspiring', yet most fail to actually live in those societies and forget, above all, that these societies are composed of people and do not primarily exist to 'inspire' unimaginative people in tye-dye shirts and hybrid sedans with 'Free Tibet' bumper stickers on the back bumper (given the scum that are the Lamas - one of the happiest days of my life was the day I read about how a boy who was believed to be the reincarnation of one of the highest Lamas quit the order saying "It was like living a lie" - who take the wealth of the region, pour it into temples and prayers while the people lack access to basic utilities, the closest thing to 'Free Tibet' I can think of is a Tibet where the Lamas are all dead and the temples have been turned into tools to vamp up the tourist industry - did you know that pre-PRC-controlled Tibet was a feudal kingdom where upwards of 95% of the population were downtrodden serfs, or that in 1997 the EU was "putting pressure on the government of Nepal to make slavery illegal"?) The fact that every time an evil capitalist factory opens in the third world there are more than enough people willing to work there is proof enough that the people there are willing to trade in their picturesque huts for something better, even if it is minimum-wage factory work. Certainly factory work is not a pretty thing, but neither is rural poverty, and every nation that is wealthy and enjoys a decent standard of living - EVERY SINGLE ONE - went through a period of nasty industrialization before becoming truly free and prosperous nations. The people who build the factories are helping economies and livelihoods worldwide; the people who protest them are, in essence, fighting to keep much of the world mired in poverty.

What globalization is, then, is the process by which the third world increasingly comes to resemble the first world. If you bemoan this for the sake of beautiful cultures, you exceed even the greediest CEO for sheer selfishness, putting your desire for an idealized rural existence above the desire of thousands of people (for every hippie, there are thousands of third worlders) for three square meals a day. The more of these primitive, tyrannical cultures fall along the way, to be replaced by nascent democracies of educated citizens (or even to be replaced by any industrial society), the better. Good riddance to the chieftains, the shamans, the Lamas. It is industrialization, not tribalism, that has cured smallpox, made cars, and sent men to the moon. It is progress, not tradition, science, not art, and reason, not spiritualism, that has brought about, for the first time, places where the majority lives above the poverty line. And yet the beneficiaries of this technology and development that made the Prius possible seek to prevent others from enjoying it. They, not the corporations, are the truly selfish ones.